Moses is the only prophet in the tradition to see God "face-to-face," and this intimate contact transforms his very body -when he comes down from the mountain, his face is altered, and he must veil . Both the altered face and the veiled face have strange interpretive histories. What may have begun in Hebrew as rays of light stream ing from Moses' visage become in Greek and Latin horns sticking out of his head; thus a history of interpretation begins which first avers the horns as symbols of power and divinity but later shifts to associate the horns with animals and demons. The veil may have also begun as a powerful symbol of prophecy, but its meaning also shifts, and it later becomes associated with passivity and femininity. These multivalent images reveal deeper realities and resonances. Moses is something other than, something beyond, the human and its gendered bifurcation. He is at the nexus where the human, the animal, and the divine meet and converge. And between the glowing face/homs and the veil lies fear, the fear of the Israelites when they behold their leader, and the fear of the Bible's readers when they are faced with Moses' ambiguities. Using affect theory, especially Sara Ahmed's critical work on emotion, this paper will explore the meanings of Moses' face, covered and uncovered, as it moves through time and community. Keywords Moses -horns -veil -affect theory -Medieval artMoses inhabits the spaces in between. Born a Hebrew slave, he moves through the waters between Hebrew and Egyptian, between slave and aristocrat. As a man, the tensions between his two identities create a situation that necessi tates his fleeing into the wilderness. When he returns to Egypt as liberator he stands between God and Pharaoh; when he leaves Egypt liberated he stands between God and the Israelites, in order to obtain the law, Moses travels up © K O N IN K L IJK E BR ILL NV, L E ID E N , 2 0 1 4 | DOI 1 0 .1 I6 3 /1 5 6 8 5 1 5 2 -0 2 2 4 5 P 0 3
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This article introduces a thematic issue of Biblical Interpretation on the high-profile field of affect theory as it relates to biblical studies. Affect theory analyzes emotions and still more elemental forces that are rooted in bodies and pass between them. In addition to previewing the six articles in the issue -three of which grapple with Hebrew Bible texts and three with early Christian texts -this introduction provides a brief history of affect theory and maps its main variants. The article also reflects on the challenges of turning a body of theory largely uninterested in literary interpretation into a set of strategies for reading biblical texts. Keywords affect theory -emotions -post-poststructuralism -Silvan Tomkins -Gilles DeleuzeIt all began with a feeling, a term once thought to be the antithesis of the criti cal and the scholarly, not least the biblical-scholarly, a term affect theory has since imprinted with a complexity bordering on ineffability. How does one trace the precise contours of a feeling? 1 The words before you germinated in a l How indeed? As Seigworth and Gregg note, "[C]ritical discourses of the emotions (and histo ries of the emotions)... have progressively left behind the interiorized self or subjectivity (... how to think or feel in an era 'post'-cogito?) to unfold regimes of expressivity that are tied much more to ... diffusions of feeling/passions -often including atmospheres of sociality, © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2014 ]
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